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Various builds of pkgsrc binary packages for OpenSSL 1.0.1h for use on Joyent SmartMachines are in process of being built at present. Once they are available they will be listed here for you to download and upgrade your own Joyent SmartMachines.

If you are on Joyent SmartMachines I have patched OpenSSL by upgrading to OpenSSL 1.0.1h. These binary pkgsrc packages are made available for any Joyent customers or SmartDataCenter / SmartOS powered public/private cloud users to use so that you can get yourselves patched.

Use wget to download the file and then use “pkg_add -u openssl-1.0.1h.tgz” to upgrade the installed version of OpenSSL installed by pkgsrc.

If you are on Joyent SmartMachines I have patched OpenSSL by upgrading to OpenSSL 1.0.1g. These binary pkgsrc packages are made available for any Joyent customers to use so that you can get yourselves patched.

Wget the file down and use “pkg_add -u openssl-1.0.1g.tgz” to upgrade the installed version of OpenSSL installed by pkgsrc.

Binary packages with love from the npm, Inc Ops Team and your friends at Kaizen Garden:

TextDrive is officially dead. Numerous users are still waiting to obtain their data off the old compute nodes.

Efforts are being made to get TextDrive users their data. There is going to be some data corruption as the partition tables on compute nodes were deleted via fdisk, and the USB Key used to boot various compute nodes was nuked.

We are working on one as a proof-of-concept to determine how much data is corrupted before repeating this process on 21 other boxes. This work is being done by the freelancers who are working on getting every TextDrive account backed up.

The freelancers that are working on restoring Amazon Glacier backups are making some progress. As soon as files thaw out they are moved to one of the two storage nodes that I am paying for so that users can get their data without the data going back to glacier after the 1 day retention time.

The General & Administrative freelancers are attempting to figure out exactly which accounts are not backed up, so that we can ensure those get backed up as well.

TextDrive received the final nail in their coffin. All the compute nodes powering TextDrive have been switched off pending drive wipes.

Users who need their data from the backups on Amazon Glacier, please comment on this thread. Please do not bog my inbox with requests for data. Those will be shipped to /dev/null as the influx of emails is taking time to reply to. You will be lucky to receive a reply from Dean who appears to not be responding to emails again.

As many of you know by now, TextDrive is going out of business on the 14th of March 2014. Dean is finally throwing in the towel on the past year of TextDrive being spun out on its own outside of Joyent. Dean placed the TextDrive forum in maintenance mode with the following message:

As anyone looking for decent support or even useful information over the past few months can attest, the revival of TextDrive has not been a success.

What began in mid-2012 as an exciting challenge fuelled by good intentions and lean resources quickly turned into a cleanup project with almost no resources.

It is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way, options to keep TextDrive growing have run out, and we will cease operations on the 14th of March, 2014.

For those who wish to know, details of what went wrong will be made available once shutdown operations have

completed.

Sorry to have let you down.

Dean

Thank you for all the fish TextDrive! It has been quite the ride since singing up for my TextDrive account years ago.

I have worked on cleaning up various chef cookbooks so that they might get opensourced sooner than later for others to use. These cookbooks which I use for my personal SmartOS sparse zone (SmartMachine/Accelerator/Instance or whatever Joyent’s marketing team calls them these days).

Part of the process is to rewrite git repositories details. So when I released the percona chef cookbook, I used the “filter-branch” functionality built to do the rewriting after I removed the “origin” remote.

git remote rm origin

For the percona cookbook this was under the percona directory when I started. By using filter-branch with the subdirectory-filter I rewrote the git repository accordingly:

git filter-branch --subdirectory-filter percona -- --all

Then I check the repo. If you have sensitive data you can export all your commits into patches and fix and apply each patch in turn.

Anyway the percona cookbook is now up on GitHub. A few more cookbooks should hopefully be released over the next few weeks once they’ve been extracted.

Something I’m trying to understand is how US bloggers just lift photos and don’t credit the photographer of the photo or request permission to use a photograph on their arcticle even though the photograph says “all rights reserved” on Flickr (it’s on the TextDrive Flickr Account).

Lauren Orsini in leui of not requesting permission to use a photograph of mine which is used on your arcticle of How Node.js Got Big which I hold copyright, please donate $200 to charity: water and we can consider your copyright infringement over.

Joyent recently released the multiarch datasets for the pkgsrc 2013Q3 quarterly. There are a few pet peeves with this release which I have been working on fixing issues that have cropped up with my chef recipes.

For those of us that use Percona Server there a few caveats now (apart from the fact that Filip and Jonathan compiles rsyslog against the mysql client libraries, you have to uninstall rsyslog with mysql-client to get the persona-client libraries to install.

The Percona Server received a manifest name change so that changed from percona-server to percona (I have had to add some logic around which pkgsrc quarterly I am using to set this correctly). I have already patched my fork of Joyent’s mi-percona for this change. One needs to now manually run mysql_install_db to create the mysql database which is no biggie (I’ve patched the percona cookbook for this but not my fork of mi-percona).

Xtrabackup is not in pkgsrc quarterly at present so one needs to manually use mysqldump in the interim which makes this an issue for numerous of their biggish like ModCloth who use xtrabackup extensively.

PowerDNS and various other packages which I use is presently on the 2013Q3 i386 build but not multiarch, so I am going to have to wait until Christopher finishes the QA work on Filip’s base (i386) 2013Q3 dataset. Multiarch might not be ready for the prime time but needs more usability testing and fixing of packages to bring it up to Joyent’s base and base64 dataset quality. For the moment I am giving the 2013Q3 dataset a pass and looking at building an interim base (i386) 2013Q3 template onto of the 2012Q2 base dataset.

Thanksgiving is a time for giving thanks for all we are grateful for. This year I am trying to raise at least $2,000.00 for charity: water to bring the gift of clean drinkable water to a community that does not have access to clean water. This is something which we all take as a given that fresh clean water arrives through the tap.

Many communities around the world are not as fortunate as us to have clean water available. Some have to walk for hours to collect dirty water, which they use to drink, wash clothes, etc.

I find it quite disturbing with the audacity of your store manager at the Canal Walk store told my pregnant wife that she is not allowed to take a her child in a trolley with her to the bathroom. Clearly there were no Woolworths items in the trolley. All of the items were from other stores in the Centre which had been paid for in full. She was willing to leave the other trolley with items from Woolworths outside of the bathroom.

Does he not understand how badly pregnant women need to use the toilet when they need to go?

As you are aware, and I am going to state the obvious for you, all your staff are your brand ambassadors. Whether you like it or not your staff fly the Woolworths flag. Bad experiences with your staff loses customers which affects your company’s financial statements.

Discriminating against a pregnant women is not acceptable. Telling someone they may or may not use a toilet is disgusting. He made my wife go to the toilets by Mugg and Bean which is quite some distance. All the while trying to keep up her bladder under control when she was bursting for the toilet. Since when is it acceptable to leave children alone in stores? Has he never heard of kidnapping? How can he tell her that there are cameras in the store to keep an eye on her stuff and our child.

Sir, how would you feel if this had happened to your wife? Furious I would imagine.

Looking back at the situation, he had many choices which he could have taken than the path he chose, I can only guess that the most likely reason was due to him being lazy / not store manager material. The most obvious one to me would have been for him to offer to look after the trolley with my daughter sitting in it and the trolley with items from Woolworths in it while my wife went to the bathroom.

Doing a snap survey of other friends that have experienced the Woolworths Canal Walk, a bad pattern emerged. Do you not think that it would be advisable to rotate the store manager to work shadow your store managers at Cavendish, Blue Route, Kenilworth Centre or V&A Waterfront to learn from how those stores create better experiences than the store he manages badly and provides shocking customer service?

You lost a customer, being sent out of your store, she never returned to purchase the items she picked out prior. I can assure you we will never return.

Yours Sincerely,

An annoyed Woolworths Customer

P.S. My wife loves the Woolies Flower Shop’s Oriental Lillies. I would suggest you send her numerous bunches of those with an apology for your incompetent Store Manager and let her know the post mortem analysis of what Woolworths is doing to improve customer experience at Canal Walk and your other stores.

P.S.S I your Social Media team do not understand the meaning of Social Media. I posted onto the Woolworths Facebook Page about my wifes experience at your Canal Walk store today and the post was promptly deleted. They should have rather acknowledged the issue there and then. By replying that they would let senior management know about the issue and let me know how to get in touch with them would have prevented me writing this open letter to you. This is another example of bad social media management that will end up being taught to marketers at university in due course.

UPDATE:

I have received email replies from Frances Nunes (Ian Moir’s PA) and Anita Scott, which I’m included below.

The reply from Frances Nunes:

Dear Mr Marneweck,

Thank you for copying in Mr Moir on the email. I am taking the liberty of forwarding this to Anita Scott, Head of our Customer Services Division for her to investigate and respond directly to you. She will feedback the outcome to

Mr Moir who will have sight of your email on his return to the office.

Many thanks for bringing this to his attention.

Kind regards

Frances

And the reply from Anita Scott:

Dear Mr Marneweck

Thank you for your e-mail and for bringing this matter to our attention.

Firstly, our sincere apologies for the lack of service, this is certainly not the manner in which we treat our valued customers.

I have spoken to Nicky February our Store Manager in Canal Walk, Nicky was not the manager who spoke to your wife, he is most upset to hear that one of his managers would act in this manner. Nicky is conducting a full investigation into this and will give me feedback shortly.

Please be assured that this matter has been taken very seriously and the necessary corrective action will be taken with the manager involved. I will ensure that you receive feedback as well as a letter of apology for Mrs Marneweck. Flowers is the least we can do to make up to her.

I would personally like to speak to your wife, would it be possible to forward me her contact details?

Once again, I am so sorry that we have disappointed you and we will have feedback for you within the course of this morning.

Kind regards

UPDATE #2:

It should be noted that Woolworth’s Social Media team still have not replied or acknowledged that I have tweeted messages at them. Or replied about the fact that they remove posts from their Facebook page. I think the failure of their social media team should be a textbook example of how not to handle the situation. It also appears that going “Old School” and mailing their staff at their Head Office makes a difference.

UPDATE #3:

Anita has managed to sort things out before lunch today (I’m a bit slow on following up on email today). Turned out the manager in question resigned two weeks ago and is unhappy that he has to work in his notice period. Anita and her team at Woolworths have sent a report back.

Regarding the Facebook post going missing that is due to some moderation efforts at Facebook that the word “toilet” appears to have triggered. The post is back on their Facebook pages’s wall.